The Figure in the Monitor: Beckett, Lacan, and Video

Society for Cinema & Media Studies

The Figure in the Monitor: Beckett, Lacan, and VideoAuthor(s): Catherine RussellSource: Cinema Journal, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer, 1989), pp. 20-37Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225393 .

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The Figure in the Monitor: Beckett, Lacan, and Video by Catherine Russell

Ought we not rather to give up thinking of man, or, to be more strict, to think of this disappearance of man ... as closely as possible in correlation with our concerns with language? - Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

In addition to his single film (Film, 1965), Samuel Beckett has made five video- tapes. The three I will discuss here, Ghost Trio, ... but the clouds ..., and Nacht und Traiime, were produced between 1975 and 1982. The other two, Eh Joe and Quad, were produced in 1966 and 1982, respectively. As with his work in theater and prose, Beckett radically reduces narrative to the minimal elements of the medium, but he is equally concerned in these tapes with the representation of subjectivity.

Jacques Lacan's observation that "the unconscious is structured like a language" and his conception of subjectivity as produced in and through language bears certain parallels with Beckett's project. The confluence of Beckett and Lacan has been remarked on by others,' and it is precisely the coincidence of the revised role of the subject in modernist literary practice (and here Beckett's work may be grouped with Duras, Robbe-Grillet, Pynchon, and Handke) and the similarly revised role in Lacan's psychoanalytic theory that encourages the appropriation of that theory for the analysis of these narrative texts.2 Beckett and Lacan were, after all, contemporaries in postwar France; both were first rec-

ognized within the intellectual climate of Kojeve's reading of Hegel and the

emergence of Existential Marxism and structuralism.3 Lacan's structural psychoanalysis provides extremely useful tools for un-

derstanding Beckett's work, but this usefulness is ultimately predicated on the fact that their respective projects have a shared impetus. In Ghost Trio,. .. but the clouds..., and Nacht und Traiime, Beckett endeavors to represent subjectivity beyond the exhausted mode of "character" - exhausted in its necessary duplicity, the actor's body forever absorbing subjectivity into object-hood. Like- wise, Lacan rescues the subject from its masquerade as ego. It is precisely this parallel attempt to represent the subject as it has been decimated in contemporary culture that distinguishes Beckett's recent video work.

Both Lacan and Beckett represent subjectivity as constituted in and by language, understood not simply as signification but as temporal chains of sig-

Catherine Russell is a lecturer in Film Studies at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario). This essay shared third place in the 1987 Society for Cinema Studies Student Writing Competition. ?1989 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

20 Cinema Journal 28, No. 4, Summer 1989



nifiers. The simplicity of Beckett's images is of course the antithesis of Lacan's elliptical prose, but the notion of ellipses - of vanishing, fading, absence - remains of central importance. In Beckett's hands, a device such as a video dissolve is at once a medium-specific reduction of image to light-source and a fulcrum of the analogy between these tapes and Lacan's structural psychoanalysis.

It is in the realm of analogy that the application of Lacanian theory to Beckett's texts is best understood. Certainly the psychoanalytic concepts help to "interpret" these tapes (without psychoanalyzing them). Moreover, there is a definite limit to which such an analogy can be taken. Lacan's category of the "real," that which remains outside discourse, also remains outside the video; even represented as light, as a body, or rain, it is always represented. Nevertheless, developing such an analogy should indicate the ways in which subjectivity, organized around desire and the gaze, is manifest in video as a specific signifying discourse.

Each of these tapes has a published script, subtitled "A Play for Television," that functions as something of an intertext, including diagrams of sets and camera positions, initials of "characters" and descriptive stage directions.4 Ghost Trio

(22 minutes) and... but the clouds... (15 minutes) were written in 1975 and 1976, and were produced by BBC2 and broadcast in April 1977.5 Both have been subsequently directed in German by Beckett (the British direction is credited to Donald McWinnie).6 Nacht und Traiime (7 minutes) was written in German for Suddeutscher Rundfunk and broadcast in Stuttgart, West Germany in 1983. All three are in black and white.

That it is subjectivity which is at issue in these three texts is suggested by the recurring centrality of the "figure": solitary, male, aged but nevertheless ageless, enveloped in a nondescript robe, whose face is only occasionally given to us, and who is repeatedly found seated, folded over himself or an object. Verbal language in all three works refers, in different ways, to this figure but remains disynchronous with him. Nevertheless, the tapes revolve around this central body in such a way that the thematic material of memory, dream, desire and solitude may be attributed to him.

It is in the very effort of attribution, though, that the role of subjectivity is problematized, for the sources of images and sounds in the three plays are, for the most part, indeterminate. The moments and images of determinacy are instantaneous and infrequent, but Beckett's project may well be described as an isolation or delineation of such loci of subjectivity. "Character" in these tapes is constructed from components of body, voice, and memory, and its enunciation is constructed from the components of videography.

Ghost Trio consists of a number of relatively autonomous levels of discourse that evolve through various relations of disjunction until the final "integrated" acts of listening and smiling. First, there is the voice-over of a woman who is neither named, seen, nor related to the figure in any but a textual way. She describes the set in which the figure is seated, first framed in a "fourth-wall" composition,

Cinema Journal 28, No. 4, Summer 1989 21



and calls it "the familiar chamber." As she lists its parts, shots of these rectangular spaces are inserted, constituting another "voice."

The visual description of the space of the "familiar chamber" includes two kinds of images. The door, windows, and pallet are shots of these items (which are also visible from the original framing of the set), but when the voice says "floor" and "wall" we are given white rectangles - of the same shape and size as the door, window, and pallet - surrounded by black. These are not images but areas of video "noise" marked out on the screen. Over the first shot of "floor" the voice says "dust" and pauses. Like the description of light, "[O]mnipresent. No visible source. As if all luminous. Faintly luminous ...," the voice is describing the monitor itself as well as (or as) the familiar chamber.

The voice also describes itself (faint) and then, after detailing the rectangular parts of the room twice, there is a cut to the "general view" of the room (the fourth-wall perspective) and she says, "Sole sign of life a seated figure." At this point a second discursive mode comes into play as the camera describes a slow halting curve into the set, leaving its original position, until the figure is framed in a three-quarter view medium close-up. The Beethoven music of the title accompanies this movement, growing louder in the advance and fainter with the retreat to the initial position.

The script for GhostTrio divides the play into three parts: Preaction, Action, and Reaction. This division points to two moments in the video text that separate the three parts (not otherwise apparent) as well as to the kind of closure that is operative. When we are told that "He will now think he hears her," the Action of the narrative begins, commensurate with the narrator's reference for the first time to something unverifiable. Like the source of the music, which may or may not be the tape recorder resting on the figure's lap, "she" may or may not be the narrator and he may or may not hear her. But the line also relates this category of doubt specifically to the figure.

The second section of the tape, the Action, consists mainly of F (as Beckett nominates the figure in the script) moving to those parts of the room we have already been shown, the new discursive mode being that of figure movement. The commentary is sparse and redundant, the camera static, and the whole section shot in a single take. F looks into the mirror (his reflection hidden from us) and the voice-over "Ah!," in its slightly interrogatory tone, signals a kind of epiphany. Immediately after this "event," F's movement contradicts the directive for the first time as he goes to the stool rather than the door, but the ambiguity is maintained insofar as the stool is near the door. While in the first section the commentary was explicitly directed to the viewer (for example, "look again," and the reference to "the figure" in third person), throughout the Action, it is possibly heard by F, if not addressed to him (for example, "Now to door."). As a discourse it is brought into closer proximity with the image track, observing changes (the flux of life), as opposed to the static certainty of the Preaction.

The transition from Action to Reaction is made by problematizing this proximity: the question of who controls the music, and who the woman is




addressing is raised for the viewer. After a repeat of the visual and aural penetration of the subjective space, and after the camera has returned to its fourth- wall position, F apparently "starts" the music by bowing his head, and then the woman commands it to stop. After she says "repeat" (her last word), the music seems to start and stop twice with F's movements. (This is more evident in the German production which Beckett directed, but even in the script and the British production the music can be seen to be cued by F's movements, marking a shift from the first two musical interventions, which are cued by camera movement.) Thus, the music closes the gap between sound and image tracks, the voice-over being absorbed - not literally, but as a discourse - into the music, and its authority or control displaced onto F's cassette player.

That music is an index of subjectivity in Ghost Trio is suggested by its simultaneity with the camera's penetration of the chamber in the first two sections. As it curves in closer to F, we don't see what F sees, but the changes in volume may be "realistically" explained by our hearing what F hears. Thus, the elimination of the Other's voice in the third part of Ghost Trio is commensurate with the altered status of the music.

What is the third section (Reaction), that begins with the command to repeat and a cut to a close-up of F, a "reaction" to? It is distinguished from the rest of the tape by (1) absence of verbal narration, (2) abandonment of the fourth- wall camera position (until the very end), and (3) inserted shots of the space beyond the "familiar chamber." It is in a sense a reaction to the domination of F by the voice and the look of the camera. From being entirely a signifier of another's discourse, he is momentarily signified by his own look.

F's subjective stance is marked most crucially in the two shots of the corridor beyond the door. The geometric lines of perspective inscribed in the composition of these shots isolate a vanishing point within the image that necessarily corresponds to another privileged point exterior to the image. Michel Foucault describes a similar composition in "Las Meninas" as a representation of "an absence that is an artifice on the part of the painter." In the filmic image it has been argued that the camera/projector centrality always forms the locus of "primary identification" for the spectator,7 but Foucault's remarks are especially pertinent to these autonomous shots in Ghost Trio: "this artifice both conceals and indicates another vacancy which is, on the contrary, immediate: that of the painter and the spectator when they are looking at or composing the picture."8

In other words, just as the cassette player and the music situate F in a renewed position with the soundtrack, these corridor shots posit him as the owner of the gaze. But the depth inscribed in the corridor takes this attribution even further by constituting F as absent. He takes possession of the gaze only by absenting himself from the image, and the inscription of a vanishing point in that image literalizes this disappearance. In Lacanian theory this might be understood as "[t]he emergence of the subject ... that fleeting primordial relation which comes before the theatre of identity and even of sexual roles, when the subject has relations only with his Other, the principle of his own disappearance."9




Whether one interprets the boy who appears in this corridor as a messenger from "her," a metaphysical figure of memory or history, or as a representation of death - or some conjunction of all of these - several formal elements of his

appearance seem to be pertinent. His address to F, his denial, and his disappearance into the vanishing point of the image all overdetermine F's absence from the image. Moreover, the psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity en-

courages us to retain both readings of the child's relationship to "her" on the one hand, and to F's past on the other, as they bring into play simultaneously and coextensively the two parameters of sexual difference and identity.

The inscription of depth in these corridor shots, and their designation of a

subject of vision, is in marked contrast to those flat, rectangular representations of the parts of the "familiar chamber" inserted in the Preaction. Those identical two-dimensional shapes, equating image to "area," subordinate any idea of cam-

era/projector (the conventional subject of photographic vision) to that of the television as light source. Although this flattening is not a function of anamor-

phosis, the annihilation of the subject is similar to that which Lacan identifies in "The Ambassadors" in which a skull, anamorphically distended in the extreme

foreground of Holbein's composition, belies the "absent presence" of geometrical optics: "This picture is what any picture is, a trap for the gaze. In any picture it is precisely in seeking the gaze in each of its points that you will see it

disappear."'? No such images recur in the section called Action, but they do in the Reaction,

with the important difference that they are now attributable to F's point of view.

They are included in a sequence of shots that the editing indicates as being equivalent to F's perspective. Distributed through the third section of the tape, they are: (1) the empty corridor, (2) a high-angle close-up of the (rectangular) cassette player on the stool, (3) rain outside the night-lit window (accompanied by "real" sound - the only one in the film with an indubitable source), (4) a

high-angle close-up of the pillow of the pallet (another rectangle), (5) an empty mirror, (6) F's face in the mirror, and (7) the boy in the corridor. Thus, between the two corridor shots is a series of discrete images in which the geometrical optics of vision are almost effaced. The compositions of (2), (3), and (4) recall the flattened "areas" of the Preaction with shallow depths of field and rectangular shapes.

The empty mirror (5) is the only one of these shots not accounted for by F's point of view. It lacks a reverse-shot (F is looking at the floor before and after the insert) and neither F nor anyone else is looking in/at the mirror. This

emptiness waiting for the subsequent close-up of F (insert (6)) is an explicit rendering of a key interstice of cinema and psychoanalysis, that of the suture."

The subsequent medium long-shot of F looking hesitantly and obliquely toward the mirror is followed by a close-up of his face. If this is a shot of the mirror from his point of view (which is the way it is described in the script), it lacks the mirror frame: the difference between the imaginary (F) and the symbolic (F's reflection) is effaced. This is a crucial moment in Ghost Trio because this




first "sighting" of F's face is also the first time that the filmic signifier ceases to be binary: it is sutured with F's perspective in the full (Lacanian) sense of

imaginary identification. After fifteen seconds in which F closes and opens his eyes, he bows his head; as the script says, "Top of head in mirror. 5 seconds" (although there is still no mirror frame). This gesture abruptly curtails the mo- mentary sense we had of sharing F's gaze and gives the look, the discourse of vision, over to the Other - the camera that had temporarily posed as a mirror.

The importance of the mirror in Lacanian psychoanalysis is well known, but aside from being a space of primary identification where language is constituted in and through the formation of the child's ego, it is also a conflation of geometric and flat optics. Foucault's analysis of "Las Meninas" also revolves around the mirror located at the vanishing point of the image. I do not wish to transpose Beckett's use of the mirror in Ghost Trio entirely into psychoanalytic terms, but simply to indicate the scope of its inscription as a sign, on a formal level, of the tape. The shot of the empty mirror clearly marks the importance of the possibility of F's nonbeing as instrumental to his emergence as a subject.

F first "finds his voice" in Ghost Trio not by speaking, but by unifying the aural space around him. And it is interesting that this occurs before the visual "events" of the third section because in Lacanian theory both aural and visual senses are implicated in desire, but "The first differences are traced along the axis of sound... the voice has a greater command over space than the look - one can hear around corners, through walls... In the construction/hallucination of space, the voice plays a major role. In comparison with sight... the voice is reversible: sound is simultaneously emitted and heard, by the subject himself ... it is as if 'an acoustical mirror were always in function.' "12

However, because F does not speak, and the musicians remain unidentified, it is the cassette player in F's possession that finally situates him in the visual/ aural space. And significantly, that locus, the tape player, is itself a binary sign, a recorder of an absent signified: the performance of the "original" music remains absent. F's "reaction" is not a matter of "overcoming" or "escaping" anything, but it is both musically and visually a suturing of the space in which he is constructed with his own absence, replacing another's absence.

After the door closes on the empty corridor for the second and final time there is a cut to the original fourth-wall long shot of the set; the first time this position has been adopted since the Action. The camera movement toward F is repeated, but this time the close-up is held "till end of largo." It is not any clearer whether the music issues from F's tape recorder or not, but he listens and we listen to Beethoven's "Ghost Trio" for its entire resolution and coda. F's smile as the camera retreats is stunning not simply because of its ambiguity, but because it is the first time he addresses the camera and us. F's passage in the tape has clearly been toward this empowerment: the actions and events that we have witnessed have been the halting steps of the emergence of a subject.

And yet this empowerment remains qualified. The tape ends with a return to the original camera position in which F is situated within the receding per-




spective of the set. The opaque window in the back wall overdetermines the invisibility of the camera as the perceiving (transcendental) subject in whose discourse F remains situated. He is an image and a signifier of another subject; he is present-for, literally "in the trap" of the "familiar chamber," in the om- nipresent light. It is this paradox of empowerment at the price of a certain freedom that Beckett goes on to investigate in visual and aural terms in... but the clouds... and Nacht und Traiime.

The crisis of subjectivity mapped out in Ghost Trio is not unlike that of Beckett's trilogy of novels, especially The Unnamable which ends with the narrator/ narration oscillating between language and death, speech and silence, trying and trying not to name himself: "... perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.""' In the video texts, as verbal narration is relatively reduced, visual representation takes on an increased significance, and it is the represented/narrated subject, rather than the narrating voice, on which the narrative depends. As I have suggested, and as the description of Ghost Trio should indicate, Lacan's psychoanalytic contribution to narratology provides the theoretical context for this representation of body and subject in Beckett's videos.

The aspects of Lacanian theory most pertinent to narrative texts in general are the interrelated concepts of alienation and aphanisis. Once discourse is understood as a process of signification, the production of signifiers involves an oscillation of the subject between presence and absence. Neither is, shall we say, a satisfactory condition for Lacan, and the desire to evade either case is his ex- planation for the drive to discourse, to speak, to image (and thus to narrate). Alienation and aphanisis, Lacan's alternative modes of being, do not really correspond to the difference between absence and presence, but to absence and present-for, and are predicated on the fact that "Any node in which signs are concentrated, in so far as they represent something, may be taken for a someone. What must be stressed at the outset is that a signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier" (FFC, 207).

Alienation, for Lacan, consists in the divided nature of the subject who is "condemned" to a displacement through discourse into the field of the Other. Meaning is conditional on its being received or understood, and so the subject as signifier, in order to represent itself, disappears as subject, or as Lacan puts it, "meaning survives only deprived of that part of non-meaning that is, strictly speaking, that which constitutes in the realization of the subject, the unconscious"

(FFC, 211). This fading of the subject who "manifests himself [sic] in this movement of disappearance" is what Lacan terms "aphanisis."

The movement of discourse, the momentum behind the production of chains of signifiers (narrative, narration) is explained by Lacan as a function of desire. The effort to escape aphanisis by "filling in" the gap produced by this disap-




pearance, is motivated by the threat posed by "the lack." It is a potentially perpetual process, as "it is a lack engendered from the previous time that serves to reply to the lack raised by the following time" (FFC, 215). While the threat of absence is to some extent governed by sexual difference and castration anxiety, it is also conditional, for Lacan, on the mortality of the subject. There is "a matter of life and death between the unary signifier and the subject, qua binary signifier, cause of his disappearance" (FFC, 218). So the subject as binary signifier, or "representative of the representation" (FFC, 217), stakes its very being in the process of the production of meaning.

As we have seen, the "emergence" of subjectivity that is desired and denied in Ghost Trio is an emergence into an imaginary state in which the narrating, observing function of the camera might be effaced. The problematic teleology of Ghost Trio may be compared to Joe's enigmatic smile at the end of Eh Joe, but whereas Joe's joy seems to be caused by the final dissipation of the voice that torments him, F's joy is far more deeply based, its cause being the entire complex passage of the narrative. Ghost Trio is also, in many ways, a development of the issues of perception and being articulated in Film, which was to be a discursis on Bishop Berkeley's dictum Esse est percipi. While extremely engaging, Film is somewhat flawed by Beckett's and Schneider's (the director) naivete regarding the medium. Although Beckett scripted a detailed relationship between camera and object (Buster Keaton), the extensive use of continuity/invisible editing in the production undermines the philosophical discourse on vision, as the organizing function of the editor is not acknowledged on the same level as Keaton's gaze. The camera and its movements are "characterized" explicitly in the script, but not maintained in the actual production as an integral discursive voice.

Ghost Trio, in an eminently less "realist" mode, problematizes the place and possession of the gaze much more systematically. It might also be compared with the anguish of self-perception that closes Film, the reversed emotions corresponding to the two characters' significantly opposite encounters with mirrors: Keaton (in Film) covers it, F discovers it. Neither... but the clouds ... nor Nacht und Traiime involve this kind of revelatory conclusion. The subjects of these tapes remain hunched over solitary tables; the brief narratives end with the images they open with.

The trajectory of the subject in... but the clouds... might be described as an attempt to pass through the field of the Other, as that passage is construed in Lacan's notion of language. For Lacan, it is only through that field that the subject can be "unary": "By separation, the subject finds, one might say, the weak point of the primal dyad of the signifying articulation, in so far as it is alienating in essence. It is in the interval between these two signifiers that resides the desire offered to the mapping of the subject in the experience of the discourse of the Other . ." (FFC, 218). Lacan goes on to describe how the original separation is between child and mother, thus grounding the process in the Oedipal drama.




But if this "signifying articulation" is understood as the constitution of subjectivity, of self-hood, we can perhaps say initially that the subject, M, of... but the clouds... is suspended in this "weak point" and his desire for the woman, W, is largely for her "field" as Other.

The division of the subject in this tape is marked in Beckett's script, where we find not only V as the source of the voice-over monologue, but M as the seated figure and M1 as the mobile figure. Without the script it is not even clear that the immobile M is a figure (a man, a subject) at all, let alone the same person as V and M1. But this very uncertainty suggests that it is, again, subjectivity that is at stake in this work. The monologue makes it quite clear that what M strives for is a certain kind of memory of W. Her "appearance" marks a point of contact between M and M1, a memory that is the same at different times in M's life. He tells us that she has died, so her presence is impossible, and the sign of the limits of her appearance is, significantly, speech: she has no discourse, no "field," no Other subjectivity.

Like the opening verbal narration of Ghost Trio, in this tape the conditions for the veracity of memory lie in the relation between word and image. An accurate description of M1 by V in the first part of... but the clouds... evolves into an attempt to synchronize his voice with W's moving lips. The first is possible because M1 = V, but in the second, sexual difference maintains a distance or break between sound and image tracks. The similarity between language and memory, and the importance of verification and truth to both, is indicated in the opening lines:

3. V: When I thought of her it was always night. I came in 4. Dissolve to empty set. 5 seconds. M1 in hat and great-coat emerges from west

shadow, advances five steps and stands facing east shadow, 2 seconds. 5. V: No 6. Dissolve to M. 2 seconds. 7. V: No, that is not right. When she appeared it was always night. I came in - 8. Dissolve... (same as 4).

The only difference between (3) and (7) is the shift from "I thought of her" to "she appeared." An active function is thereby attributed to W and her imaginary status is partially revoked, as M tries to conceive her as Other.

Memory in... but the clouds... is creative and verifiable, indicating a relationship with the Real - the roads that M1 is said to walk - but is ultimately limited to the production of signs, alienating the subject from the real. Again, it is Lacan's ontology of being that provides a theoretical category for Beckett's use of "the function of recall" in memory. Lacan's revision of the Cartesian cogito as "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think"'4 pertains, again, to the fact that subjectivity depends on the discourse of the Other. In memory, "the recognition of desire is bound up with the desire of recognition." Lacan's explication of these remarks provides a gloss for... but the clouds...: "In other words, this other is the Other that even my lie invokes as a guarantor




of the truth in which it subsists. By which we can also see that it is with the appearance of language that the dimension of truth emerges."15

The central, constitutive "lie" in ... but the clouds.... is the contradiction between the assertion "Vanished within my little sanctum and crouched, where none could see me, in the dark," accompanied by Ml's disappearance into the vanishing point of the image, and the immediately succeeding shot of M in which he is precisely crouched in what can only be his "sanctum." Despite what is said, we do see him. The subject here retains an imaginary relationship to the real by evading the truth that causes such anguish to the subject of Film: there is no escape from perception. In his sanctum M/V claims not to see himself, or be imaged, but he does see her (W) - or else he "busies" himself "with something else, more ... rewarding, such as ... cube roots, for example, or with nothing...." But this is false too, for he clearly also thinks about, remembers, recalls, recounts his repeated activity of entering, exiting, changing his clothes, "walking the roads" and retreating to his sanctum.

Although V accurately describes Ml's actions, there is a temporal gap between the two discourses; the voice (present) remembers the action (past). But is V the temporal equivalent of M, the hunched figure in the sanctum? These monologues are in the past tense, and M's lips are unseen, and yet since this is the originary position of M, that which M1 "voids" to walk the roads and "vanishes to" via the north shadow, the verbal discourse accompanying the images of M could well be interior monologue, past and present occupying the same continuous space. But this question is never posed, and in the temporal ambiguity of the relationship between V and M, the discourse wavers between imaginary (unified) and symbolic (divided) representation.

Ml's disappearance into the "north shadow," the image's vanishing point, is the means by which he is represented as a sign in another's discourse, especially given Beckett's diagram of the set, which posits the camera as the corresponding southern point. In the ritual of entering and exiting this space, the spectator, viewer, and auditor, is potentially the other subject for whom M's actions are repeatedly performed. V even says, as M1 crosses and recrosses the empty set,l6 "facing the other way, exhibiting the other outline...." The binary nature of the sign is given an imaginary unity in the coextensive "vanishing" of voice and image, and this is the constitutive illusion, the lie in which the subject "subsists."

And yet Ml's disappearance into the darkness, and V's careful enunciation of the words "the back roads" after the third repetition of this vanishing ritual, suggests that in Ml's visual absorption by the monitor, insofar as he disappears as a point of light, he is not even a signifier. The secluded search through memory cannot be represented; it is neither of the real nor of the symbolic. Furthermore, the dissolve of the geographic and geometric space of M1 into the other highly uncoordinated, unconnected, dissociated spaces in which we see M and W effaces the subject of perception.

The flat images of M and W, distorted and in sharp contrast to the perspective inscribed in the shots of M1, maintain or reproduce the "lie" of imaginary




signification by effacing the lack or absence that is constitutive of desire. The gaze is for Lacan a crucial "relation of subject to subject," but here "the function of the existence of others as looking at me" is radically denied by the postures of the actors and the composition of the images. Lacan asks, "Is it not precisely because desire is established here in the domain of seeing that we can make it vanish?" (FFC, 85). This is what Beckett does, defining this "domain" in the low-definition video image.

This said, there are a number of isolated moments in the text in which the subject, M, almost becomes a signifier in another's discourse. These are the dissolves back and forth between M and W (shots 29 to 32, 43 to 49, and 55 to 57 in the script). In the longest series of these transitions, a blank white spot on M's sleeve literally "becomes" a bright spot on W's nose;17 they are virtually identified. This is of course the "first case" that M distinguishes (she appears). But when she "lingers" (the second case) at the end of the longest series of dissolves back and forth, M makes an impossible demand: "look at me." It is impossible because if it is directed to W, she has "unseeing eyes," and if addressed to the viewer, we are still denied access to his face.

Nevertheless, this whispered plea, together with the succeeding futile demand to be spoken to, can be understood as a kind of climax of the narrative, as after this he admits that she rarely appeared at all. These lines underline the tape's paradox: M's sense of self, his subjectivity, depends on his desire for her, but only in the eradication of desire can he be a coherent subject - thus his object of desire is unattainable. In this deconstruction of courtly love, M's solitude may only be broken by being recognized and addressed, and thus by being displaced into another's presence. The emphasis on appearing and disappearing in the continuous use of dissolves to extreme illumination, and in the monologue itself, indicates that what is at stake is precisely the possibility of the manifestation of the subject.

Insofar as it is a "fading" into the discourse of the Other that is attempted here, the subject potentially experiences its nonbeing, which Lacan describes as "lethal," as a matter of "life and death" (FFC, 208). Death in this tape is only alluded to briefly ("With those unseeing eyes I so begged when alive to look at me.. ."), but in the Yeats poem "The Tower" from which Beckett's title is taken, and in the few lines quoted from it at the end of the tape by V, "the clouds of the sky" is an image specifically related to mortality.'8

To return to Lacan's formulation of Descartes's cogito, M can be said to "think where he is not," in the sense that he preoccupies himself with memory, mathematics, or "nothing." And his attempt to merge this memory with his (also remembered) activity of walking the roads and changing his clothes is an attempt to prove - or, perhaps, to find - the corollary: "to be where he thinks not." He wants to "be" in the sense that the clouds are distinguished from the evening horizon or the bird cry from the silence. That it is futile is predetermined by the absence of another's discourse, through which he could be constituted as the signified of her as signifier, as meaning, and thus a subjectivity. She exists only




in his memory, and thus within his own discourse. And M/M1 remains a "binary subject," as both signifier (voice, memory images) and signified, determining his own vanishing and nonbeing.

While ... but the clouds.... might be described as taking place entirely within the Lacanian "imaginary," M's symbolic access to the Real being entirely limited by the circumscription of memory, Nacht und Traiime reintroduces the real in an unusual way. This tape, even briefer and with less verbal information than ... but the clouds... is a depiction of a refuge of subjectivity. Neither emerging as in Ghost Trio, nor submerged as in... but the clouds..., the subject here is suspended in time, in space, and in discourse - if that is understood as the spatio- temporal discourse of video.

Once again, it is only through Beckett's script that we can know the precise relationship between the two figures in this tape. The face of the figure A, whom Beckett calls "the dreamer," remains concealed by his bent posture and the dark lighting throughout the piece, so it is difficult to identify him with B, "the dreamt self" whose face we do ultimately see quite clearly in left profile. Nevertheless, the opposition of the two profiles and the discursive relations between them certainly suggest such a relationship. The two hands that appear in B's "space" are marked in the script as L and R, but are not associated with any particular or singular subject.

The simplicity of Nacht und Traiume belies a range of interrelated levels of significance. First of all, there is a very literal oscillation between a symbolic and an imaginary realm of consciousness. As space is lit by "evening light," indicated by a small rectangle above him, and his dream is re-presented in the form of an image, clearly identifying his place in the Lacanian symbolic. B, situated in the imaginary space of As dream, after sharing the screen with A in a sort of split-screen composition, and then disappearing altogether, returns to completely displace A, thus casting the entire image into the realm of the imaginary. The difference between dreamer and dream corresponds to the difference between narrator and narrated, indicating again, the primacy of subjectivity and language in the tape, this time in almost literal narratological terms.

The "action" of Nacht und Traiime, beyond this initial and repeated act of dreaming, consists of: (1) a hand, L, rests briefly on B's head, (2) another hand, R, offers a cup to B, from which he drinks, (3) R wipes B's brow with a cloth, (4) B raises his head into the light, raises his right hand, R rests on it, B looks at the clasped hands and puts his other hand on top. And finally, "Together hands sink to table and on them B's head" (script, 306), and (5) repeat of (1). Each of these is delineated by a hand emerging from the darkness around B, and except for (4) and (5), retreating back into that darkness. This series is performed once on the small scale of less than a quarter of the screen-size, in the upper right-hand corner of the monitor, and again "in close-up," or in the full proportions of the screen.19

Although I have suggested that B's space is "imaginary," this image is




qualified in a number of ways. The cup from which B drinks is an extremely unusual object to find in a Beckett video: its shape and design are heavily connotative, and it is really more appropriate to call it a goblet. Together with the white cloth used to wipe B's brow, the Christian symbolism is so overt, and so sudden, that it functions almost as a symbol of symbolism (in its conventional, religious, sense). If the symbolic order is the mode of our encounter with the real, these images in Nacht und Traiime constitute an engagement with that order without, however, quite encountering any "reality" beyond these two mute objects.

The drama of the dream in Nacht und Traiime is an enactment of a relationship qua relationship. The Other is without voice, face, or body. Beckett describes B's upward look as a gaze at an "invisible face," but it is doubly invisible or impossible because of the extreme difference or noncoherence with the angles of the two hands, which are themselves at impossible angles to each other. Moreover, the entire encounter with these hands can be understood as an enactment of the ritual of communion. On this allegorical level, the hands/priest mediate between subject and cup, the cup/wine between subject and Christ, and Christ between god and man. The "invisible face" is thus synonymous with the "divine light" that illuminates B's upraised face.

But in Nacht und Traiime this allegory is inscribed not for the sake of God, but for the subject. The goblet, the cloth, and the light are merely representations of the Name of the Father, signifiers of an impossible signified. Impossible, but necessary for the emergence of the subject into language from the imaginary. If the condition upon which subjectivity is possible is, for Lacan, the Oedipal drama, it is for Beckett the profound otherness of God. It is neither a matter of reverence nor belief, but of being signified in and through another's discourse - a discourse here of gesture and ritual and light, not of speech. Nacht und Traiime is thus a spatialized contemplation of the structuring principle of Waiting for Godot.

The subject's allegorical inscription in a religious discourse in Nacht und Traiime is ultimately displaced onto his graphic inscription in the video image, a discourse that belongs to no one, but to the mathematics of the medium. This inscription is performed by two complementary movements. First of all the right hand (R) that bears goblet and cloth emerges from the vanishing point of B's space, from the center of his square. The movement is less a use of video special effects (although some such technique may have been employed) than a strategic use of lighting: the figure is lit in a soft but shallow space so that the movement of the hand, R, from background to foreground appears to be an emergence from the depth of the monitor.2

When the "dream" is repeated in what Beckett calls close-up (screen-size) this point is the very center of the monitor. The emergence of the white hand constructs a space as long as the arm, literally the ghost in the machine, but the space does not belong to an absent perceiving subject, because the absent subject, the Other, is on the other side of the mirror/image. The blow thus dealt to the transcendental subject of the photographic apparatus is, however, tinged with a




tenderness difficult to describe: the soft lighting on this hand works against any sense of a video grid, and the action is one of reaching, not grabbing.

The second movement is the sliding expansion of B's initial quarter-size space over the whole screen, obliterating A. Beckett's use of "videography" here describes the extreme two-dimensional flatness of the television screen: the image of B is literally stretched or blown-up before our eyes, and then, after the "action" of the dream is repeated on this scale, the shrinking of B repeats this effect. Thus, while the emergence of R from the depths of the image marks the source of the video image as being within it, the sliding expansion of B marks this depth as illusory. Together, the two movements describe two axes of representation light (inside to outside) and graphics (vertical and horizontal) - in which the figure is literally suspended.2'

The brief lines from the Schubert lied hummed and sung before each appearance of B are indeed about a suspension of being, in the form of a more traditional refuge of subjectivity: "Holde Traiime, kehret wieder." And the clasped hands, R held between B's, meet at the intersection of these two axes so that the slow formation of this image the second time, center screen, is extremely powerful. The complete transformation of the constitutive graphic terms of the medium to the human terms of the figure is accomplished when B draws these hands down, away from the crucial (other, awkward) center-point to his table and rests his head on them. In this movement B appropriates the discourse in which he himself is constituted, for himself.

Furthermore, the chief sense operating in this tape is that of touch. The subject, A/B, neither sees nor hears, but feels the weight of the hands, the rim of the goblet, the texture of cloth, and tastes the contents of the goblet. The difference between the tactile senses and the eye and ear is that a lack or absence is contained in the latter two. They are the basic organs of desire because, as Christian Metz points out, "the lack is what [desire] wishes to fill, and at the same time what it is always careful to leave gaping, in order to survive as desire."22 The indubitable presence effected by contact in the tactile senses, on the other hand, deconstructs desire, obliterating lack and absence.

The emphasis on tactility - weight, touch, and taste - in the encounter with the Other in Nacht und Traiime renders that Other, whatever its status, unthreatening. If desire is predicated on lack and absence, desire in this tape is reduced to a desire to dream, not to speak or hear, or to be in the discourse of the Other, but to dream of being in the discourse of the Other. The spatialization accomplished by the graphic movement across the monitor is buttressed by repetition and the symbolization of an eternal Father, a static relation to that Other that authorizes all language and symbolization. It detemporalizes the narrative process, renders it as static as possible without losing the effects of the subject. The tape may ultimately be a desire for no desire, for a state of being only possible in a pre-Oedipal, and even pre-mirror state, and in its return after death. The lack effaced here is best understood as the structural lack of mortality.

The subjectivity that is delineated in Nacht und Traiime is a "refuge"




because it depends on neither alienation nor aphanisis. The spatiality of the tape, both symbolically and graphically, circumvents the necessary disappearance of the subject in temporal discourse. When A, the dreamer, does literally disappear, it is an aphanisis in his own discourse (he dreams of and for himself) and his disappearance is literally into the machine - he's sucked into its darkness in a repeated fading. Moreover, the conflation of the Other into simultaneously divine and video light (the hands at once those of God's mediator and those of the

machine) annuls both poles, and recasts that Other as pure paradox.

If the limit of the analogy between Lacan and Beckett is found at the limit of representation, the insularity of Nacht und Traiime is perhaps a demarcation of such a limit. With the elimination of any address to a subject of vision or audition, the discursive register is entirely limited to representation, the dialectic of symbolic and imaginary traversed in the chain of signifiers (A, A + B, B, etc.) referring to a category of the real that exists only within the monitor - as a patch of "evening light," and other isomorphisms of light source and signifier. The Other is always itself represented. Where Lacan's ultimate concern is with patients, training analysts, and the "science" of psychoanalysis, Beckett's is with the representation of subjectivity, and the vicissitudes of its sheer possibility.

Lacan's theorization of subjectivity has been described by Regis Durand as "a dramaturgy of the subject."23 The parallel project implicit in Beckett's video texts indicates the pertinence of Lacanian theory to narrative, despite the "displacement of certain concepts from their original locus." Durand also notes that "this metaphorical gesture is in the logic of Lacanian theory itself." While there are other theorists of the "crisis of subjectivity" Lacan provides the tools for understanding this crisis as it is represented in temporal, narrative, form.

The narrative impetus of Ghost Trio,... but the clouds ..., and Nacht und Traiime may not be self-evident, yet the role of repetition (in all the scripts Beckett refers back to previous images and instants instead of describing them

again) points to the dialectic of metonomy and metaphor that drives and binds each text.24 Second, although "character" is never assumed in these tapes, the relationship between body, voice, and visual representation is played out in these narratives. As Fredric Jameson has noted, "as the ideologies of 'identification' and 'point of view' make plain, 'character' is that point in the narrative text at which the problem of the insertion of the subject into the Symbolic most acutely arises."5

Durand indicates the importance of Lacan's thought to the contemporary world, a world that writers such as Baudrillard and Jameson characterize as one in which "the subject can no longer be whole and dominant... his position has finally been demonstrated to be untenable." In this context, "Lacan's efforts appear as the (perhaps) last adventure of ironic subjectivity, of the 'insular economy' of the subject, doomed, because of his insularity, to alienation and isolation. Most of our narratives... (involve) the ever-renewing promise of ac- complishment, the promise that there would never be an end to the story. That




is (was) the beauty of it, of the subject and his many stories of which Lacan's may be the last baroque version."26 This description fits Beckett's work equally well.

The comparison or parallel between the two might also be viewed in terms of the problem of enunciation. If, as Lacan says, "there is no subject without, somewhere, aphanisis of the subject, and it is in this alienation, in this fundamental division, that the dialectic of the subject is established" (FCC, 221), the interaction between the subject of enunciation and the narrated "I" in texts such as The Unnamable can be understood as representations of subjectivity identifiable only by their split, "divided," status. In each videotape - Ghost Trio,... but the clouds ..., and Nacht und Traiime - the figure must literally disappear in order to move from body to subject. Furthermore, the intertexts provided by Beethoven, Yeats, and Schubert in all three of these tapes are taken by Beckett for titles, and serve as the means by which he himself "disappears" into the other, historical discourse of romantic and modernist humanism.

The three texts mark neither a progressive unification nor a dissolution of subjectivity, but perhaps mark a progressively more refined understanding of "solitude." To use Lacan's theory of alienation somewhat more metaphorically, these three video works stand as three different answers to the impossible (He- gelian) choice: "Your freedom or your life." This, for Lacan, is "the primary alienation.... If he chooses freedom, he loses both immediately (it is only a freedom to die) - if he chooses life, he has life deprived of freedom" (FCC, 212). The subject of Ghost Trio chooses life, but he has meaning only insofar as he disappears, effaced by his image, by his vision, and is subordinated to the music and the camera - the discourse of others. The subject of... but the clouds... withdraws from the decision, becoming a slave to his own memory, fixed in the idea of death. And the subject of Nacht und Traiime is the most free of the three - free to dream, but also the furthest removed from the tem- porality of life: the closest to death.

But what is perhaps most astonishing - at once most beautiful and most disconcerting - about these three video texts is that Beckett locates aphanisis and alienation within the electronic medium. The freedom, the expansion finally rendered by the obscurity of Nacht und Traiime, takes the video monitor for a mode of being in the world. The annihilation of the subject of vision (the place once guaranteed by the projector) is represented in each tape in different ways. From the gray rectangles of video dust in Ghost Trio to the flattened, abstract and "too close" images of figures in ... but the clouds ..., to the sliding graphics of Nacht und Traiume, Beckett exploits the absent projector in his analysis of subjectivity. The light that comes from within the video monitor is the ultimate and final icon of solitude.

Notes

1. Eileen Fischer, "The Discourse of the Other in Not I: A Confluence of Beckett and Lacan," Theatre 10 (Summer 1979): 101-5. Also, Beckett's name and quotations from




his texts are used by theorists from Rosalind Krauss to Peter Brooks as evidence of the pertinence of the psychoanalytic theorization of language to contemporary lit- erature.

2. Regis Durand, "On Aphanisis: A Note on the Dramaturgy of the Subject in Narrative Analysis," in Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory, ed. Robert con Davis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 866.

3. Although Lacan attended Kojeve's lectures at the Ecole Pratique des Haute Etudes, there is no reason to suspect that Beckett did. However, the existential flavor of his early work is certainly consistent with those intellectual currents in France that Mark Poster has described in Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975).

4. The scripts for all three tapes discussed here have been published in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1984). All further references to this collection will be included in the text. The role of the script as an intertext is true also of Film, which has been published by Grove Press (1969), along with an essay by Alan Schneider detailing the frustrating experience of realizing Beckett's theoretically and practically precise script.

5. Ghost Trio and... but the clouds... are included in a tape called Shades, which also includes Not I (a tape of a text that was originally written for and performed on stage) and a pedantic documentary on Beckett. Shades was produced by Tristram Powell for a BBC2 series called "The Lively Arts."

6. The difference between Beckett's direction and that of the British versions, which were undoubtedly produced in consultation with Beckett, pertains to a certain angst of mise-en-scene. The figures are more stark (gaunt and still), the lighting is darker, and the pace is slower in Beckett's versions.

7. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 49.

8. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 16.

9. Durand, "On Aphanisis," 863. 10. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-

Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 89. All further references to this book will be included in the text as FFC.

11. While the application of this term to the cinematic signifier has been developed by a number of theorists (including Oudart, Dayan, Heath, and K. Silverman), the original formulation of the term, drawn from Lacan's seminars, is J. A. Miller's: "Suture names the relation of the subject to the chain of his discourse... it figures there as the element which is lacking, in the form of a stand-in." See Miller, "Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier," Screen 18, no. 4. (Winter 1977-8): 25-26. In filmic discourse this "stand-in" is generally taken to be the source of the gaze; the identification process that is generated by the reverse-shot figure being a form of suture.

12. Mary Ann Doane, "The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space," Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 44. In the passage cited, Doane is quoting Guy Rosolato.

13. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 414.

14. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 166.

15. Ibid., 172.




16. Is it possible to compare Beckett's use of the term "empty set" in his script for... but the clouds... with Miller's designation of the zero in his explication of Lacanian suture in the terms of Frege's number theory? "In the order of number, there is an addition, the 0 and the 0 counts for 1. The displacement of a number, from the function of reserve to that of term, implies the summation of the 0. Whence the successor" (Miller, 31). One could also compare Beckett's use of number theory in the novel How It Is (1964) and the video Quad to Lacan and Miller's use of algebraic symbols as a means of expression outside the traps of linguistic discourse.

17. It should be noted that this does not happen in the compositions in the German Beckett-directed version, which are comparatively underlit, indicating that the effect in the British version was, perhaps, accidental. A videographic slip of the tongue?

18. The stanza from which the lines are taken runs: Now shall I make my soul Compelling it to study In a learned school Till the wreck of body, Slow decay of blood, Tasty delirium Or dull decrepitude, Or what worse evil come - The death of friends, or death Of every brilliant eye That made a catch in the breath Seem but the clouds of the sky When the horizon fades: Or a bird's sleepy cry Among the deepening shades.

"The Tower" (1926) in W B. Yeats: Selected Poetry ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1962), 111-12. The last four lines are whispered by V over the image of W before the final fade-out on M.

19. In the script, Beckett writes, "Move in slowly to close-up of B, losing A./Dream as before in close-up and slower motion" (306). In fact the images of A and B have the same proportions; B is simply larger than A, the full screen superseding the quarter-size image that it literally slides over.

20. Similar uses of lighting, specifically intense spots that delimit parts of bodies from the darkness that surrounds them, can be found in at least two of Beckett's stage plays that have been very successfully translated (not simply recorded) to video: Not I and What Where.

21. The other hand (L), appearing from the top upper-right corner above/beside B, and the light that B looks up at, have the effect of fixing this suspended state as they, too, are figured specifically along these axes.

22. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 59. 23. Durand, "On Aphanisis," 861. 24. This is a crude summary of the model of narrative developed by Peter Brooks from

a conjunction of Russian Formalism and Lacanian theory in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1985).

25. Fredric Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Crit- icism, and the Problem of the Subject," Yale French Studies 55-56 (1977-78): 381.

26. Durand, "On Aphanisis," 869.




The Figure in the Monitor: Beckett, Lacan, and Video

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